Facebook will add “unsend” feature after secretly deleting Zuckerberg’s messages
theverge.com
theverge.com
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
The reddit thing was petty, but didn't really do any material damage. Uber's God View was more troubling...showing how you could track politicians/celebs usage of the platform.
But facebook...this admission opens the door to speculation that Zuckerberg could have theoretically taken ad hoc 'God Mode' actions against users of his personal interest...read their messages, view their activity logs, etc. Only Facebook knows, for now.
Here's cperciva's insightful post on the issue: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-01-19-playing-chicken-w...
Customarily, companies who have shares in trade on a stock exchange are considered a “public” company. It’s why it’s called “going public”, which Facebook did in 2012.
I imagine it’s always been there but they never planned to turn it on for normal users. Just a secret ability for some insiders.
Now that people know, it’s a “feature we’re developing” instead of an internal tool/ability.
However, none of his behavior so far has given us any reason to give him or Facebook the benefit of the doubt
Is it ? There are tons of features that don't get published because it would cause user confusion, companies don't want to support them officially, or it has business side effects that make them non suitable to open to a large audience.
Even features that are only open to support people or admins to avoid normal users to abuse them.
Facebook does this shit all the time, they do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
They also add that Secret Chats in Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram already support removing an already sent message. Facebook decided to also offer this feature for regular Messenger chats.
I guess any headline carrying Facebook, Zuckerberg and privacy concerns can make it to top these days. Modern online journalism is a whole another subject.
Unfortunately we don't have government organizations that help with moderating discussion (like a therapist would), such as a parent would help children learn how to communicate with others in difficult situations, to deal with emotions, etc; and if bad behaviour, giving someone time-out until they can "play nice" again.
We have to of course make an environment good enough, rewarding enough to be part of, that it's an incentive for everyone to want to play nice.
Perhaps we need to come up with a new system (separate from legal system, or part of justice-education system) for dealing with situations that teach compassion when compassion/understanding is missing, e.g. should bullying a crime, or who should we leave that up to - is it even required to bring all participants related to bullying together, parents of the perpetrator and the victim, and create a healing circle to uncover the deeper underlying issues?
The whole point would be to rally support, so we can build stronger, deep community - and society could, like with criminal law, have fines or other limitations created if people decide to opt-out of this system.
We really need to become more comfortable with accountability, that our actions have consequences - though we also must support a practice of learning, mistakes happen during learning, etc; there's pretending to have learned, and genuine change/evolution in a person's thinking and behaviour, difficult to perhaps tell in some cases online.
There are things I've said in discussions I've had here that were not always well informed or motivated by my better self (yeah, you're free to peruse my comment history and see). Or I may have just grown up a bit since I said them. Either way, I've always felt it a bit unfair that they could be dug up years later.
I think there is some merit to the idea of Right to be Forgotten[1] but at the same time, I feel like that would just help evil people hide their true nature. The other half of me wants to just have the NSA dump everything one day and let everyone know what everyone else has really been saying for the last 15 years. The first couple days would be tough for everyone to acclimate knowing who everyone really is. But in theory that is a net good. Deception is rarely for good.
I doubt there's anyone who decides "Imma be evil" or realizes it of themselves to such an extent. If you believed you were evil, wouldn't you want to change it? Even terrorists don't think they're evil.
Maybe another approach to all this could be that, once you post, you can delete for a while shortly thereafter. But then your post goes into a period of extended residence on a site. Perhaps a year or something. After that residency period has expired, you're free to delete the post.
About a decade ago I was involved in building what became for a short span one of the best cinephile discussion boards on the Internet. Aside from HN, or maybe MeFi I can't think of any forum that sustained a signal-to-noise ratio of that quality for that long. It was night-and-day better than IMDB boards.
Naive and idealistic as we were, we have users full control to edit/delete posts. Over time we tightened that to have time limits, etc. But there was one big loophole which was you could delete your entire account and it would purge all your posts. Eventually one of our most prominent members with thousands of posts decided to (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻. The result? Utter incomprehensibility of half the threads, effectively rendering the history useless if not downright misleading.
I get that the pendulum has swung too far and users deserve more control of their data, but a public forum is fundamentally a different thing from a social network—a forum thread is different from a post in that the value of the thread is communal, it should not be owned by the individual in the same way that it makes sense for a social media post to be. And even in that case, I think most of the problem comes from the giant many-tentacled nature of Facebooks and Googles where the data doesn't even come from directly entering it in and it's incredibly difficult to even visualize what they have. For a simple forum I think it's perfectly reasonable (and clear!) to have ToS that state: you post it, it's here forever, barring special requests due to extreme circumstances or legal reasons.
If anyone has more knowledge, or understands the source better, or has newer code, I'd be interested to know.
Not a good idea if halfway through writing an entire manifesto or some neo nazi rant you decide to not post it.
I call these “shadow posts”.
But no, HN doesn't do this, only companies like Facebook or Twitter would stand to gain from that information (e.g. a shooter almost tweets his plan to attack but doesn't post it).
Hmm, I think I’ll write a library to do something like this, I just need a cool clever name for it.
(Whether that really removes the bytes or flips a delete flag who can say)
Edit: as others have pointed out, this only deletes things locally for you which makes this a pretty deceptive feature... https://m.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/242107552657620
Your SMS, IRC, etc. messages are stored locally. Your Facebook messages get loaded from Facebook.
and fair points about email... I had assumed this worked like other parts of Facebook, which doesn't seem unreasonable given they control the whole stack. (and they did shut down their old XMPP gateway awhile back)
Really positive development from this entire mess of a scandal.
Those messages aren't going to be deleted, they're just going to be hidden. They could be un-unsent as easily as they could be unsent.
If you don't trust your friends not to blackmail you, you can't trust them not to just save every message themselves at the time you send it anyway. Even so, "unsending" messages is a meaningless gesture to security because you have no way to verify that anything has been destroyed. Facebooks track record clearly demonstrates that in the absence of evidence, they definitely aren't destroying the data. This feature will be marginally useful for correcting typos, and that's about it.
This says a lot about the current situation. What else don't we know?
Mark has a different Facebook. I bet he doesn't see ads, unless he wants to. And, come to think of it, when he or other blessed entities delete something, it's really gone. Come to think of it, I wonder whether their data gets scooped up by the various monitoring and collection tools that are doubtless built in to the product and its administrative interface.
Are they really dogfooding their own product, at this point?
Ahh, you were so close too!
If some engineer at Facebook wants to log into the account of someone they have a crush on, search for nudes or something else nefarious, I have yet to learn of any systems in place to prevent that from happening besides Facebook telling us to trust them.
They used to have a master password to log into any account[1]. They say they replaced this with a special tool you need "permission" to use.
Quote from the article "Finally, while the interviewee says the ‘master password’ has been deprecated, employees can still access your profile through a special tool, but they need to provide a reason for why they’re doing it. If they get audited down the line and fail to provide an explanation, they can be fired"
That sounds like a system where you trust everyone and audit later to verify nothing bad happened. Imo these systems are put in place to hide abuse not reveal it because they are reactionary instead of preventative.
That entire system of checking employees from abusing data, relies of everyone trusting the people in charge at Facebook to do the right thing, insert "dumb fucks" Zuckerberg quote here[2].
Imo it is a matter of time before we find out about wide scale massive data abuse from Facebook employees. Either an insider feeding out data to others or someone on the inside listening to hedge fund managers private conversations to insider trade off of.
I am just generally tired of everyone trusting everyone all the time. We have to have rules and systems in place to eliminate the need for trust.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2010/01/11/rumpus-facebook-privacy/ [2] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg#Quotes
I would guess they are doing something like that, internally.
Or, somewhere, um, 'locked in a file cabinet in a lavatory with a sign on the door, Beware of the Leopard' (mentioned on HN yesterday by another commenter, who had the exact wording), is there a giant Google Apps contract for FB? ;-)
{ message: `They "trust me", dumb fucks`, isDeleted: true }
In the UI: "Your message was successfully deleted!"
But it wouldn't surprise me in the least.
This is entirely why I dont delete anything now.
I feel like there are some blackmail companies that are web crawling looking for deleted comments and posts.
Or if they dont exist today, they will in a few decades.
Well, more like if user=zuckerberg, delete, else, hide.
They wouldn't want those "deleted" messages from Zuckerberg to show up in discovery...
And that was emails, vs. social media messages. So not sure how it would apply in this case (IANAL).
https://medium.com/@anton.rozenberg/pavel-durov-sued-senior-...
but UNSENDING messages.
Rant: FB is a data hog. But shares data with ad companies. To entice them into advertising. Otherwise their ad platform sucks.
Screenshots aren't absolutely perfect as evidence, but since error level analysis can show up many kinds of graphic manipulation, they're pretty good on a practical level.
Screenshots as evidence, how laughable.
The message might "disappear" after a few seconds, but at that point FB may have already extracted the information they want from it, information they will use to further their business.
Assuming users want some sort of privacy, from whom is it that they want their messages to remain "private"?
Will there ever be options in FB "privacy settings" such as:
[ ] Do not share with Facebook
[ ] Do not share with advertisers, political campaigns, etc.
Absurdity aside, the mere feasibilty of this is itself debatable.
Do users want their messages to remain private from companies like Facebook?
How about from FB's clients, e.g., advertisers, political campaigns, hospitals, etc.?
How about from the rest of the general public?
We now know as confirmed by FB that this user data has been shared for years. Perhaps FB can argue this was "informed consent".
However users can change their minds in light of more information. They should be able to revoke that consent going forward.
Will all that "leaked" user data FB has intentionally shared self-destruct after some period of time? Unfortunately, no.
It seems to me that, in the main, the parties that have the greatest incentive to monitor users messaging are in fact companies like FB and their clients.
They have a financial incentive that is in the aggregate far greater than any individual (petty criminal, etc.). Collecting user data has become their business. "It is literally just what we do." Period.
Finally, thanks to the explosive growth of single websites into vast monopolies like Facebook that extend their reach into nearly every corner of the internet, they, the companies behind these websites, are in the best position to do it.
It should be self-evident but maybe needs to be restated: These companies cannot protect the user from the company itself. The amount of trust required of the user depending on these websites is simply mind-blowing (from the perspective of someone who has lived in times when no such trust was necessary).
Thats only an opinion. I respect any disagreement and welcome karma subtraction as a means to express it.
My additional concern is that, I do not use Facebook. I deleted my account like 10 years. Yet they still retain data on me, not only without my consent. They have the opposite of my consent. I explicitly told them to delete everything they had on me and I am opting out of their service.
Yet articles like this pop up time and time again[1]. There is talks about them scanning every picture on facebook for faces and building profiles of everyone, including non-users.
How am I, a person who has no Facebook and does not want anything to do with them supposed to stop them from monitoring and tracking me.
Imagine if in high school you found out some guy in your class was keeping records of the structure of your face, or the websites you visit and you confront them to stop and all they say is other students have allowed me to do this so I keep everyone's records to make it easier for me to track the people who gave me permission.
I assume everyone would not be comfortable with this, especially if they then go to sell that data to the students running for class president so they can manipulate your friends to harass you to vote for their candidate.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/19/facebooks-tracking-of-non-...
Is HN turning into an anti-Facebook echo chamber? I cannot believe the amount of posts about Facebook, condemning Facebook, blaming Facebook, assuming the worst motives of Facebook, and picking apart every word said by Facebook executives. In every post's comments there are the same tired "you are the product", "I deleted Facebook and if you don't you're an idiot", "dumb fucks trust me" comments.
It's getting so that I don't even want to refresh here, since at any given time a chunk of the headlines are taken up with the same old shit hating on Facebook. I roll my eyes and move on usually, but it's getting to me to see a forum I enjoy devolve into a negative hate train of spite.
I don't work for Facebook, they thought I wasn't smart enough to work there. I have no financial interest in Facebook. I do use Facebook moderately often. I'm mostly just tired of seeing the negativity and hate.
It's worth our time and effort to bring up the issues, hash them out, run through ideas, gather evidence , etc.
I've been here 3-4 years, and Fb (and Uber) have a special level of hatred here. If my first job had been at facebook I'd have stayed off here because I'd have found the toxicity impossible to take.
On the other hand, people fall over themselves to defend Elon Musk for doing pretty much the same thing Uber did: Kill a person due to misleading marketing, enforced by a statement with more misleading stuff.
Regarding some of the specific comments you're seeing repeated - yes "you are the product" gets trotted out a lot - but it's basically correct, isn't it? You haven't offered any counter-argument here. Pointing out that Facebook's material incentives are absolutely not aligned with those of their users is always going to be relevant when discussing how Facebook handles user data.
Facebook could minimize the data they gather instead of maximizing it, they could give users fine-grained control over what data "partners" get to use/target, they could make the defaults for many options private. There's no incentive to do any of this though - so in many cases they do the opposite [1].
Facebook is getting beat on because the left and the privacy conscious are concerned, for slightly different reasons, over the scope of the corporate manipulation using personal data, and the Trumpist segment of the right wants to keep attention on FB to deflect as much public attention as possible from entities tied to Russia and/or the Trump campaign involved in the same scandal.
That doesn't quite give everyone a beef against Facebook, but it does mean they are getting adverse attention from all sides.